this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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In some religious traditions, it's not believed that they're loopholes, or cheating.
If the written rules are the precise literal words of your deity who can make no errors, then if something is technically allowed it's allowed on purpose.
The deity wouldn't make a mistake or try to trick people into following a rule that wasn't written.
Yahweh says no tending a fire on Saturday. Alright, what is "fire"? Is electricity fire? Is it a prohibited labor? Time to think.
God says no eating creatures of the land or sky. Well, otters aren't of the land or sky, so fair game.
Allah says no pork unless your life depends on it. Is processed porcine collagen still pork if it's used in artificial heart valves? What level of chemical transformation is required to remove the "pork-ness"?
The belief that a deity cares about the spirit of the the written rules and not the words is itself a religious belief.
Which, in some religions, means it's open to debate to figure out exactly what it means. :P
That thinking only works if you don't realize that it's all in interpretation, its not a loophole persay it's a series of loopholes you sorta work around and jump through.
Loophole to me means that you found a way to cheat the system.
If you believe your deity is entirely onboard with being a rules lawyer, then finding clever ways to do things while following the rules is just "following the rules".
If your deity says no firestarting on a Saturday, so you start it on Friday to use Saturday, why would you be in trouble for following the rules?
So if I get some to agree that fire is only flame from wood grown from trees native to Israel, then I can barbecue on Saturday and it's Kosher.
( The idea being that if rules are allowed to be interpreted, then they can be interpreted into anything. If electricity is fire (many Jewish sects say yes), then my sect can say oxidized propane isn't fire and also be correct.
Yup, that tracks. As you mentioned, there are disagreements about the exact meaning and consequences of the prohibition already, so if you can find source material to back your argument, you can argue it.
They don't view it as interpretation, but as closer to a legal argument. There's the written law, and that's what matters, the deity won't judge you based on unwritten laws, because their goal was to write down the criteria that you'll be judged by and the rules you need to follow, not to judge you based on your ability to infer the intent of the rules based on what they told you. Similar to how, when you go to court in the legal system, you're judged by the law as written, not by the intent of the congressperson who proposed the law.
The belief that it's the spirit that matters and not the letter of the law is itself a religious belief derived from early Christian rejection of the legalistic aspects of Judaism. It's why so many people in this thread have such a "well of course you're not supposed to debate the semantics of your religion, you're supposed to know what God meant and do that instead". Same for when someone "cheats" the legal system to "escape punishment" by "getting off on a technically", since what they did was supposed to be punishable. Legally, that's called "following the law", or "making a valid legal argument".
Some religions and people just don't hold that belief, and so "what if an argued position clearly subverts the intent of the rule" just isn't a compelling negative consequence, it's just part of what happens with debate.
It's got no bearing on either of our points, but I believe the Jewish interpretation isn't that electricity is fire, generally, but that incandescent lightbulbs violate the prohibition on "igniting a fire", and that many other applications violate prohibitions on things like "lifting", "doing work", or "cooking".
So electricity isn't the issue, but rather what you do with it, and even if you argue that it's only fire if it's Israeli wood, you'd also have to argue that BBQ wasn't cooking.
Unfortunately that was original the interpretation. It has since been amended into "building a circuit" and/or "doing work" as explanations. Of course neither of those hold up because turning on a water tap or turning a door knob aren't prohibited.
So there is no basis for following laws. It's only tradition and tradition can be however you define a word.
BBQ can be declared as not cooking by definition just like turning on a cold water faucet is declared as not work by definition.
I'll admit that I'm not entirely sure what point you're arguing anymore. If you think religious law is malleable through argument, then religious law changing after argument or discussion isn't a problem, it's just how it works.
Wouldn't you know, there's actual debate with citations about faucets and the circumstances In which they're permitted or not. It's not "all work" that's prohibited, but specific categories in certain circumstances. I'm neither a Rabbi, a scholar of talmudic law nor even Jewish so my understanding of the specifics are only about as deep as curiosity has taken me over the years. I don't think the specifics matter for this discussion.
Yes, there's nothing actually tangible about any law, religious or otherwise that compells people to follow it beyond cultural momentum. Words lack inherent meaning and it's only through shared convention that we agree on meaning or order in our society.
No one legit believes any of that shit or they wouldn't sin in multiple every fucking day.
I wonder why your comment is being downvoted. As if understanding people different from myself is a bad thing.
I was wondering that myself, but I'm not one to complain about Internet points.
My theory is people have an unrecognized internalization of the new testament attitude towards a legalistic approach to religion, which is ultimately where the "spirit vs the letter of the law" phrase originates, albeit in the context of "between love and the law, choose love", not "don't eat fish because I'm not great with words and forgot to mention them".
I'm the stories, Jesus is pretty strongly against not only the legalistic approach but also any religious law beyond "I rock, be cool, follow your heart".
Which adds a bit of irony to all the Christian schisms over minor points of interpretation, including the schisms over this very point I'm making right now.
Also fun: there's a legalistic debate about the merits of legalistic debate versus perceived intent or purpose in the talmudic tradition going back thousands of years.
No irony, these were in essence about the very core parts, namely nature of God.
Miaphysites and monophysites believe that human nature and divine nature of Christ are inseparable or one and the same. This poses some problems for both religious and worldly hierarchies.
Then whether there is the trinity or it's one common entity or something else, and the divine nature of the son. More or less the same.
I mean, I'm not a specialist and I'm simplifying things, but still core Christian beliefs and the philosophy behind schisms one can describe on a few pages. These are not hard to get. It is all about politics in the societies in which the centers of various branches of Christianity existed.
It's basically that the Roman Church didn't quite like the idea of having the divine in every human. The divine is much more convenient to be limited to the central hierarchy. Then after the Arab conquest of a lot of the Christian lands it had more relative power and made it canon.
The East-West schism is more nuanced, but mostly was about politics too, and the interpretations more convenient for the Western feudalism and the Byzantine system which was still kinda feudal, but differently.
At the same time Eastern and Oriental Catholic churches (Armenian Catholic, Chaldean, Greek-Catholic) are in many things more similar to, well, the churches they split from, except for accepting the authority of the Pope.
Oh, I get that the schisms are very political and complicated, but I still think there's a bit of irony in "love God before arguing over details" being met with "but what is God, really?"
It's not like, hypocritical or anything, just a bit ironic.
I mean, the first phrase kinda contains the answer that God is love. Well, at least for miaphysites it's a perfectly good description. There is the Nicene creed yadda yadda, but generally Armenian and Coptic priests seem to be fine with such an interpretation.
It's depressing, not ironic. There's the song "Wings" by Nautilus Pompilius (Russian rock band popular in the late 90s), this kind of depressing.
Eh, potato po-deep-theological-rifts. :)
As a pretty nonreligious individual, I don't have much connection to think of it as depressing.
You profess to be less than an expert, but you're definitely more knowledgeable than I on this topic, so maybe you could help me with a question?
I seem to recall there's a term for the various sects that eschew a lot of the more complex doctrines in favor of a "return to basics" or individual style, Quakers being the one that comes to mind.
Do you know what that's called? As a layperson nonbeliever, that particular thread has always seemed to capture the core of it, or at least the "love and kindness" part that appeals to someone who doesn't need it for a deeper life meaning or purpose.
I'm non-religious in terms of believing in magic and guys on the sky, but I understand what spirituality is and how it makes people different.
I also deeply respect a few writers whose works I've read and people I've met, influenced by it.
And I respect the fighting spirit. May not always have as much of it as I'd like.
It's not about connection, it's about in one case it being perceived as some emotion allowing you to come out against the whole world for what you consider good with your head up, and in another case it turning into some set of sophisticated mystical explanations why you are a slave, and the latter having somehow descended from the former.
Protestant? Reformist?
Well, those include many branches which may not be always in that direction.
I don't know.